Having switched to Android SDK development over the past year, I’ve run into quite a few interesting and unexpected challenges. So how does library development differ from app development?
The high likelihood of unreliable network connectivity led us to lean into mobile solutions for robust client side persistence and offline support. The need for fast product delivery led us to experiment with a multiplatform architecture. Now we’re taking this one step further by using Kotlin Multiplatform to write platform agnostic business logic once in Kotlin and compiling to a Kotlin library for Android and a native Universal Framework for iOS via Kotlin/Native.
Users expect to have a seamless experience with your app. Crashes can lead to an increase in poor reviews, uninstalls and even damaging your brand perception. From talking to the community we know that one of the main reasons to adopt Kotlin is safer code. In this post I’ll share a couple of the ways Kotlin improved the stability of a few of our partners’ code but we’ll also look at the results of some Google Play store stats and see if there’s a correlation between using Kotlin and the number of crashes (spoilers: there is!).
onCreate With the 1.4 Update, kotlin coroutines brought us a lot of features and improvements. One of them was the introduction of SharedFlow. Basically, what I would like to call it, is simply a “Single Event StateFlow”. Remember single event LiveData workaround? Well, here you have it, but 100% kotlin, and not a workaround anymore. If you are more interested in an even more detailed explanation, follow this issue on Github, brought by Roman Elizarov.
